The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Congratulations to Sam LLewellyn on the launch of The Marine Quarterly.  A more handsome nautical vessel would be hard to find. (The Marine Quarterly that is.)

It would be considered poor form for me to comment at length on the quality of the content, since the launch issue includes a piece by me, ‘Stars and Waves’ on the subject of traditional Pacific navigation techniques. Suffice to say, the whole is beautiful and fascinating.

I suspect that the nautical community will soon be divided into two groups, those that know of the MQ and those that do not.

For more information or to subscribe (it is subscription only) visit The Marine Quarterly.

I’m doing some research at the moment and came across this line, written by the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, about flying fish:

‘Like swallows they shoot forward in thousands in straight lines, always against the waves.’

I’ve seen a fair few flying fish in my time, even been hit by a few. I’ve also come across this idea that they always fly in a set direction relative to the waves a couple of times before, but I’ve yet to work out whether this is true or not. If so it could offer some interesting navigational pointers for times when the wave direction is hard to gauge. Anyone able to shed any further light on this?

The flying fish in this picture is one that hit me in the face in the night when crossing the Atlantic singlehanded. It gave me one hell of a shock, but lost the fight…

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I have just spent a couple of nights living in the beautiful, but spartan, Archirondel Tower, a Martello tower on the east coast of Jersey in the Channel Islands. Built in 1792, it was extensively ‘refurbished’ by the occupying Nazis in 1941. A swastika and date are still very easy to find on the inside of the tower.

My father-in-law and I took great pleasure in resting on the ramparts and identifying the navigational marks out at sea, using a pair of binoculars. ‘There, I have the Giffard Port marker!’ One of us would cry as the waves pounded at the rocks below and their mist mixed with the smoke rising up from the freshly caught mackerel on the BBQ at our feet. The red and white stripes of the tower are themselves an aid to navigation, easily identified by shipping near and far.

For the two days we…

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This morning, as our Land Rover rolled onto the Brittany ferry, or MV Bretagne as she likes to be called, I had a cunning plan. I would use the pretence of work to escape the mayhem that was sure to ensue on our return from our summer holiday. While our young boys tried and generally succeeded to convince their mum that two hours of singing clowns and suspect magic were preferable to another game of ‘destroy the duty free shop and then pillage the canteen’, I would slip out onto the deck with a notepad and pen.

The wind was SSW about force 5. The speed of the ferry meant that the difference between true and apparent wind was stark and varied significantly depending on whether you stood in the slipstream or behind a break of some sort. The waves, however, did not succumb to such vagaries and marched obediently…

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